Great Plains (21 page)

Joy! I leaned against the sturdiness of the McGhee sister by my side. From the wooden floor came a dust that smelled like small towns. Thoughts which usually shout down joy in me were nowhere in sight. I read in some magazine once that the most important word in American movies is “home”; that Americans, being immigrants, have strong associations with that word. The Robinson sisters turned and did a move that was mostly from the knees down. I was in the middle of America, in the middle of the Great Plains, in the midst of history, in the valley of the Solomon River, in the town of Nicodemus: in my mind, anyway, home. “Home on the Range,” a song whose first verse (“Oh, give me a home…”) is familiar to millions, has a less familiar second verse, which goes:

Oh, give me the gale of the Solomon vale

Where life streams with buoyancy flow,

Or the banks of the Beaver,

Where seldom if ever,

Any poisonous herbage doth grow.

All around me, I observed an almost total lack of poisonous herbage. The life streams were flowing with buoyancy. I was no longer a consumer, a rate payer, a tenant, a card holder, a motorist. I was home. The world looked as I wanted it to. My every breath was justified. I felt not the mild warmth of irony, not the comfort of camp, not the cheer of success and a full bank account; just plain, complete joy.

What a humming engine this feeling was! Joy like this is so rare in me as to be endangered. Did people use to feel like this all the time? Was this what those old-timers were looking for, and finding, on the Great Plains? Certainly, no man was ever happier than the first plains Indian to ride a horse, when time and space changed in an instant, and two feet were replaced by four, and a ridge that used to be a long, hot walk away was suddenly as near as a thought, a little leaning forward, and a tap of heel to flank. How it felt riding uphill, and how it felt leaning back over the haunches going downhill, and then the smooth feeling on the straightaway when the trot stretched into a gallop! Instead of seeing the upraised tails of the back ends of disappearing buffalo, the Indian was suddenly part of the herd itself, observing what they looked like when they ran, picking the ones he wanted to eat, driving his arrow all the way through them into the ground, then walking his horse back over miles to see how many he'd got. Wrapped in a buffalo robe at night, he must have had a physical memory in his whole body of the horse moving beneath him. The Minniconjou Sioux John Fire Lame Deer, in his book
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions,
says: “For bringing us the horse we could almost forgive you for bringing us whiskey.”

And how great the fur trappers must have felt, sometimes, seeing this land when it was still completely wild! A trapper with a good gun and two mules and a partner to share the watch at night was liable to leave the settlements for the West and never come back. Trappers who weren't killed were changed so that they never wanted to sleep in a house again. Kit Carson went West when he was seventeen, and travelled enough of the wilderness to earn him an airline mileage bonus today. Jim Bridger, sometimes called the King of the Mountain Men, first crossed the plains at eighteen, did not return to the settlements until he was thirty-five, stayed a short while, then went back. He told people that not once during those seventeen years had he tasted white bread. And how much fun the cowboys must have had, mixed in with the pain of their job! They were America's first continental citizens, seeing south Texas and Canada in a single season, carrying everything they needed with them on their saddles, stopping in towns with nicknames like the Gomorrah of the Cattle Trail (Ogallala, Nebraska), Hell on Wheels (Sherman, Wyoming, among others), and the Holy City of the Cow (Cheyenne, Wyoming). How pleasant to dance at the Cottage Saloon in Miles City, Montana, with Connie, the Cowboy Queen, who wore a $250 dress embroidered with the brands of every cattle outfit between the Yellowstone and the Platte! And imagine the time the early railroad passengers had, shooting buffalo from the windows of the moving train, filling the compartment with smoke, shouting, laughing, then retiring to the saloon car! And how on-top-of-the-world it must have felt to be a town builder, sitting in a wagon above a cottonwood-lined river valley and seeing the promised land!

Probably the happiest man ever to ride the plains was also probably the most famous. In her book
Boots and Saddles,
Elizabeth Custer, wife of General George A. Custer, said, “My husband used to tell me that he believed he was the happiest man on earth, and I cannot help thinking that he was.” Custer graduated last in his class from West Point in 1861, was jailed there after graduation for neglect of duty as Officer of the Guard, was released through the intercession of his classmates, fought many battles in the Civil War, became the youngest major general in the history of the Army by the end of the war, was appointed to the 7th Cavalry, fought several engagements with Indians on the plains, was court-martialed and suspended from duty for a year for ordering the shooting of deserters while on a forced march across Kansas primarily to see his wife, was reinstated after ten months through the intercession of General Sheridan, led an Army expedition to the Black Hills (in violation of a treaty with the Indians) in 1874, discovered gold, told the newspapers, started a gold rush, was removed from command for making unsubstantiated allegations of corruption against President Grant's brother before Congress, pleaded on his knees before General Terry to be allowed to serve in the Indian war which had followed the gold rush, was reinstated through the intercession of Generals Sheridan, Sherman, and Terry, led the 7th Cavalry in pursuit of Indians in the summer of 1876, continued the pursuit past where his orders said to stop, discovered a village on the Little Bighorn River in southeast Montana, attacked the village, and died, with about 265 of his command, at the hands of thousands of Sioux, Cheyenne, and other warriors. The event was the crescendo of a century of history on the Great Plains. Among the millions of words circling invisibly above the granite memorial on the low ridge where the bodies of Custer and some of his men were found is an account of Custer's death which Sitting Bull gave to a newspaper reporter. “He killed a man when he fell. He laughed,” Sitting Bull said. Although Sitting Bull did not see that himself, I like to believe it. I like to believe Custer even had fun dying.

At West Point, Custer entertained his classmates with comical mistranslations of French assignments and silent pantomimes in his pew during chapel. All his life, he enjoyed heedless and extreme practical jokes. Whenever he received orders to move, he celebrated with “wild demonstrations of joy,” smashing chairs and whirling his wife around the room. She thought he was a riot; once, when she was with guests in the parlor, and he wanted her to come to him in his study, he made her laugh uproariously with a note which read, “Do you think I am a confirmed monk?” The Great Plains, which he called “the fairest and richest portion of the national domain,” were his playground. In the field, he sometimes travelled with his own cook, a cast-iron cookstove, a sixteen-piece Army band, and a pack of staghounds—one named Lucy Stone, after the woman-suffrage leader. Whenever buffalo crossed the line of march, Custer was liable to forget everything and take off after them. During one such chase, he accidentally shot his horse through the head, leaving himself stranded and alone in hostile territory miles from his command.

In his only book,
My Life on the Plains,
which is mostly about the plains Indian campaigns of 1867–68, he tells of finding the bodies of twelve men who had been caught by hundreds of Sioux. As it happened, these men, led by Lieutenant Lyman Kidder, had been looking for him. They were a special detail sent by General Sherman with orders for Custer, who was wandering as usual at his own inspiration far from where he was supposed to be. The fate of these men caused him no guilt; rather, as he followed the trail they had left trying to escape, he thought, “How painfully, almost despairingly exciting must have been this ride for life!” The bodies were so mangled as to be unrecognizable, shot with “twenty to fifty” arrows each, limbs hacked, genitals cut off and stuffed into mouths, eyes cut out and laid nearby on rocks, etc. “How painfully, almost despairingly exciting…!”

Custer's life demonstrates the power of a person having fun. Why, for example, were his superiors never able to restrain him successfully, or to keep this repeat offender away from important command? Maybe because they secretly looked up to him; maybe because a career of cavalry charges and danger and glory was something they had dreamed about as boys; maybe because he more closely resembled the soldier they had dreamed of being than they now did. Or maybe they simply loved him—Custer was good at being loved. The congressman who appointed him to West Point remembered him as “beautiful as Absalom with his yellow curls.” Several now-forgotten Army officers did a better job fighting Indians on the plains, but Custer's fame is the victory of fun and myth over complicated history. Pursuing his boy's dream of a life on the Great Plains, a land which was itself a dream in many people's minds, Custer finally ran into the largest off-reservation gathering of Indians ever in one place on the continent, and gave them what was possibly the last really good time they ever had.

Later the Indians said that their encampment along the Little Bighorn stretched for miles, that they knew the soldiers were coming after them that summer, that Sitting Bull had foreseen the victory days in advance with a vision of “soldiers without ears falling upside-down into camp,” that the first attack came at the southern end of the camp, that they chased the soldiers there into defensive positions on a ridge, that then they saw flags coming over a hill to the east of camp, that Custer and more soldiers came pouring over the hill, that Crazy Horse said, “That's where the big fight is going to be,” that Crazy Horse led the first charge against Custer, that the soldiers dismounted and retired back up the rise in good order, that some soldiers held the horses while others shot, that the Indians tried to kill the horse-holders first, that soon the dust and smoke made it difficult to see, that warriors on horseback flew through the dust like shadows, that eagle-bone whistles were shrieking, that Indians shot and sometimes even scalped each other in the confusion, that the battle “looked like thousands of dogs might look if all of them were mixed together in a fight,” that the Indians so outnumbered the soldiers they could have killed them with their horses' hooves, that the soldiers were covered with white dust, that many soldiers were killed with hatchets and stone clubs, that the fight lasted “about as long as it takes for a hungry man to eat his dinner.” Myth adhered to every Indian who was there. Well into this century, warriors who had fought Custer were famous on their reservations. (After World War I, some were reluctant to admit Indian veterans to their warrior societies, on the grounds that that war was “just shooting.”) Indians recounted the Little Bighorn in songs, stories, drawings, paintings, and interviews with white reporters. The way people never forget where they were when President Kennedy was shot, Indians remembered what they were doing—eating, minding the pony herd, visiting a friend, greasing for a swim in the river—on the morning when the 7th Cavalry attacked. A man named Iron Hawk said that as he prepared for battle he was shaking so much and the pony he was holding was jerking so much that it took him a long time to braid an eagle feather into his hair. A woman named Mrs. Spotted Horn Bull (her husband was later to die with Sitting Bull) was in the hills digging turnips with many other women from the camp that morning; a mural-sized canvas tipi liner which she later painted of the event shows her and her digging stick and the turnips at the top of the picture, and the battle below. The Sioux holy man Black Elk, who was thirteen at the time, said that as he walked among the dead soldiers the smell of blood made him sick, but “I was not sorry at all. I was a happy boy.” A warrior named White Bull told an interviewer, “It was a glorious battle, I enjoyed it.”

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A person can be amazingly happy on the Great Plains. Friends have told me the joy they felt, say, driving from Sheridan, Wyoming, to Hardin, Montana, or buying a turkey from a Hutterite religious colony near the Canadian border, or watching TV on New Year's Eve in the Trail Dust Motel in Matador, Texas. So I know the way I felt in Nicodemus watching the Robinson sisters dance wasn't just me. Joy seems to be a product of the geography, just as deserts can produce mystical ecstasy and English moors produce gloom. Once happiness gets rolling in this open place, not much stops it. And if the Great Plains are like that today, what must they have been like in the nineteenth century, when man didn't have to share the stage with laws or institutions or machines. The Great Plains provided an obligingly blank backdrop for Custer, for the Sioux, for gamblers and buffalo hunters and river pilots and outlaws and trappers and cowboys. People pursued happiness here so fiercely that sometimes they touched it just as it was disappearing; and when their “real” lives were over—when Custer was dead, the Indians subdued, the open range fenced, the easy money gone—Great Plains adventures became theater. Only a few years after Little Bighorn, Buffalo Bill Cody, the former Army scout better known as an impresario, hired some of the same Indians who had fought Custer to reenact the battle in his travelling Wild West Shows. In arenas all over Europe and America, Custer died thousands of times more. The Wild West Shows also featured cowboy gunfights, trick shooting and roping and riding, stagecoach robberies, buffalo, bucking horses, etc. Old-time plainsmen who would never have “real” fun again were paid to have imitation fun.

Wild West Shows toured until the 1950s, but by then they had competition from rodeos, cowboy-and-Indian movies, and Westerns on radio and television. When I was a kid, every boy and some girls knew who their favorite cowboy was—usually Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, or Hop-along Cassidy. In the late 1950s, there were thirty Western series on prime-time television. Nobody makes Westerns for series TV anymore, and Western movies are rare. Like the plains themselves, the genre has been mostly forgotten or abandoned. Western movies are box-office death, supposedly. The dust which choked the Custer battlefield would tend to rule out any movie on the subject at Walt Disney Studios, which has four guidelines for screenplays: no snow (winter scenes are out), no headlines (recent news stories are out), no rural (the action must take place in an urban area), and no dust (Westerns are out).